If youve had your old printer for several years and youre planning to replace it then you've got a treat in store - the quality of documents they produce has really improved in recent years.

Before you head to the shops though, have a think about what youll want to print most of the time.

Inkjets the best all-rounders
If you want a device that can print almost anything; photos, colour documents, and black-and-white text then an inkjet is probably your best bet. Inkjets are versatile and many will even allow you to print directly from a memory card, without you having to turn your computer on.

For high quality plain black text documents that cost pennies and take seconds to produce go for a mono (black-and-white) laser printer. You might even want to consider a colour laser printer, they've really dropped in price over the last 12 months and they're particularly useful if you print lots of web pages, business brochures, maps for the kids homework, as well as plain text letters and essays.

All of our Best Buys produce documents to a high standard at decent speeds as well as having reasonable running costs.

It's very quick too, producing a five page letter in just 23 seconds, and also benefits from very low running costs as the cartridges last a long time. We were able to print 3318 pages on our test run before the cartridge ran out.

Text quality isn't the greatest but it's still adequate. When it comes to printing everyday documents such as letters this machine isn't brilliant: our testers noticed that there was some bleeding on the text.

Canon Pixma IP3300
Price: £50
Score: 63%
Type: inkjet
Canon's Pixma range is well known for producing decent quality inkjet printers, and the iP3300 is no exception; it's a Best Buy.

This printer is a good all rounder - it's great for text, good for photos, prints quickly, and has some of the lowest running costs around.

HP Colour Laserjet 1600
Price: £130
Score: 63%
Type: colour laser
The HP Color Laserjet printer is a Best Buy and produces very high quality text documents with sharp, solid black letters. In addition, this is one of very few printers which produces good quality colour spreadsheets.

Laser printers aren't generally recommended for printing photographs because the ink isn't suitable for use with glossy photographic paper, and when we tried printing some using HP's Colour Laser Glossy Photo Paper, the results were poor, grainy and streaky.